Not that you deserve any excuses, but here are some that each partially explain is letting the home opener go with little mention here.

First, the less obvious... I worked a 12 hour day on Friday, plus caught Liverpool's away match to Chelsea at the newly minted 'The Team,' Carragher's new little brother situated next door on West 39th. Between the work hours and the elation at a sports team winning an improbable game away from home against recent champions and likely title contenders, gearing up to write about the Bills' loss to the confusing and unironically shit Jets was a non-starter. A busy weekend of varied personal and familial tasks kicked the can further down the road.

Second, the obvious. Yes, they were bad. Yes, the idea of heaping on scorn was both appealing and nevertheless unsavory after waking up to Buffalo twitter's commendable implosion. All true things. All reason enough to take a few days off, but not the whole story.

Third, the practical. This team became impossible to write about in a compelling way for a few days. Not for everyone, obviously; I didn't but read a smattering of the takes on the loss and everything that came thereafter, but it was clear that at least some of those takes were worth writing and having other people read. Slam dunk subject matter of a completely indefensible pro sports franchise, for sure. But not for me, I guess.

Partially because I wasn't interested in bringing a tired perspective to the table (though I'm good with doing that now), partially because I knew the people that read us here do so out of a voracious appetite for #content, meaning they will already have read others with actual circulation give a serving of fair takes reflecting the altogether consistent hatred of this fucking football team among the fan base and local media, and partially because suddenly the landscape of the Bills kept changing over the course of the 3rd quarter and then on through the rest of the weekend, I let it lie for a few days. It was hard to gear up with a well-balanced take when it seemed likely it would be mooted by some forthcoming report we'd inevitably be given a few hours later.

Ok, so there's the background, and it's that last point I want to take up for a little two-step.

I watched the second half of last week's game on DVR at 1 o'clock Friday morning. My body gave out around 10 Thursday night, during halftime, and I went to take a "nap," waking up diligently to finish the game in about 30 minutes. For all intents and purposes, I'm sitting right in the beginning laps of middle age, and maybe I need a Red Bull or five to stay up late and pound beers like I am wont to do, but I can rally with the best of them. Even for a football team I love to hate and hate to love.

At first, it was gravy. Man, the start of that second half was fun as balls. These motherfuckers had me scribbling notes about the good things I was seeing - Sammy drawing coverage away from secondary targets; Tyrod making it work despite his weaknesses and the play-calling ruts; the way the defense was attacking the ball; Tyrod calming the bench down after his TD to Salas, like he knew there was a lot of work still to do (there was); Sammy getting hyped as hell for his fellow receivers; the kickoff coverage; Leodis and his fumble recovery. There was a lot to bemoan about the first half (which I watched on mute hashtag marriage hashtag billing hours) - failing to make Fitz pay for early mistakes, weak play calling (again), and curiously poor coverage in the secondary, for starters - but for a little while in the 3rd quarter the team had me drawn back in. I was exhausted and parts of my brain were probably still asleep and accordingly much of my memory of how everything went down is unreliable, but I found myself sitting there all "man Hartman was right, this team can be fun and that's good."

Haha, what an asshole that guy is.

Nearly as quickly as the bug of "shit are they really going to win this, fucking awesome" got caught, the Bills scorched the hope with a glazed malaise of prototypical Buffalo Football and all momentum fizzled with a muted squelch. A quick useless drive after Robey-Coleman scampered into the endzone with the kind of purpose that fuels the legs of a middling roleplayer, forfeiting the team's best (only?) opportunity at solidifying a two possession game; cornerbacks asked to do too much while being far too gassed by the abbreviated time that the offense possessed the ball; a pretty bad team's dream playing out through the Jets' night; a similarly bad but persistently worse team facing a reality we'd been assured would not come.

Even for those of us who never really bought what Rex has been selling, the clarity of the failure was shocking.

With the tech assist from my DVR, this failed denouement lasted no more than 12 minutes of real time. Though my tired eyes had a hard time comprehending the new depths of garbage that this team insists on wading into, it's ultimately nothing more than an inevitable shoe drop these days.

And now, the Tuesday after, the shoes haven't really stopped dropping. Maybe that's the only positive to find in the landscape of this moment: at the very least, the club's near-instant reaction to the pair of spectacularly Bills losses confirms that what we watched was, yes, really bad; so bad that the organization's track record of artful PR and head-in-sand management was no match for the clarity of this recent run of Suck.

Of course that positive has its limits, and the last four and a half days have seen the local sport punditry try to make sense of the doubly fucked scenario, asking "why is this team so shit?" and "even if the club recognizes that it's shit, are the people in charge equipped to right the shit?" This second question arguably deserves to be first, and it's probably an easier question to answer: Nope. No evidence that anyone - from top to bottom, from Terry and Kim to Russ "Burns When He Pees" Brandon to Doug to Rex to Rob to the entire coaching staff to the trainers and the room full of jamokes just waiting to throw someone under the bus - has any real competency in the area of making this a good football team. Roman was by no means the top of anyone's list of most culpable, and so long as his remains the only head to have been severed against the chopping block, his firing will remain a move nakedly futile on its own.

When the ship is sinking and remains so in perpetuity, everyone is accountable and no one accountable.

Maybe that changes soon, and again, that's the optimistic angle if you want one: someone pretty high in the ranks got kicked to the curb, meaning the Pegulas do not like owning and watching a shit Bills team. And, frankly, that's no small thing when compared to the Odious Taint ownership that we lived with for so long. Even so, it's just not enough. Now that the prism of our consumption of this team isn't bound to the fear of it leaving Western New York, now that #OneBuffalo has been branded onto our subconscious and that prism of fear replaced with a marketed commitment to success and community through this team, it's right to expect more from the Pegulas. If these teams of ours are going to claim to reflect the best of us as a community of neighbors and friends and sports fans, it's right to look at Roman's firing and exclaim "great, good, what's next?"

All the same, it's exhausting as hell to be at the familiar crossroads where the best we can hope for is a quick road to abject failure, draft picks and yet another One Bills Drive reboot, each more pathetically distant from that 90s small screen magic as the last. No amount of optimism or #OneBuffalo corporate circle-jerking can cure that in the short term, with the best case scenarios hitting pay dirt some years down the line.

The sooner the Pegulas wash their hands of all the terribly milquetoast football management talent in their employ, the better. So, what's next?

The OutlanderRarely does a result go from one inevitable conclusion to an opposite yet still inevitable conclusion. One minute I was penning a post preaching the ultimate palatability of the CFL as a replacement for the Bills and the next minute the very idea was laughable. One minute the Bills were gone, the next minute they weren’t. To be a man so powerful that your mere presence tips the scales of a billion-dollar entity firmly from one column to another, rendering the presence of the other billionaires and media conglomerates impotent in your wake, is a power that I simply cannot fathom. To have the ability, the determination, and more importantly the closing speed to shape the future of a metropolitan area in a way that politicians are unable and entrepreneurs ultimately lack the vision, the benevolence, or as one of the Toronto columnists put it last week, the craziness to do themselves for so many years. Terry Pegula is a force of nature that, if drawn up in a hypothetical five years ago would have been the only way for both teams to have long term security in Buffalo and would have dismissed out of hand as being too absurd, to pie-in-the-sky, too batshit insane to ever actually emerge.

Well I'll be damned

And then, once he did emerge, once we were aware of his intentions, once he sold one of lord knows how many billion-dollar tracts of land that he owns, the endgame was already written, the Buffalo Bills wouldn’t be going to LA, San Antonio, Toronto, not today, not tomorrow, not ever. In the end Terry Pegula is the only person that will allow the Ralph C. Wilson truthers to blather on about how he was really the foundation of this franchise’s future in Buffalo and not get laughed out of the room. In the end Terry Pegula saved Ralph Wilson’s legacy, perhaps collaterally but fully and completely. Once Pegula Sports and Entertainment conveyed their interest to get involved we could have packed up shop, except we can’t do that; this come-from-ahead defeatism eventually gets so ingrained that we refuse to accept the inevitability of success- at least until we can confirm the oasis is not another mirage. What strikes me most at a time the guy is about to plop around a billion and a half to participate in a crooked, malicious league, is that Terry Pegula is ultimately a bigger person than most of us. I don’t mean his spending power - this is unrelated to how he accumulated that wealth over the years - but the ultimate decision that this was how he wanted to use his money. In the three years since solidifying the Sabres' future and redefining the parameters of success (“just break even,” anyone?), as well as the dedication to win at all costs, he has received an almost constant deluge of tar and feather from the boobs who work a couple buildings down on Washington Street and who demanded he answer about the Penn State scandal as if he was an accessory; who turned his folksy demeanor against him as if he were campaigning for office; who used the hesitancy to clean house to paint him as out of his element, as Mr. Magoo, as incompetent and star-struck; and who convinced a not-insignificant amount (mostly those decrepit enough to prefer their morning paper to turning on a computer) to feel the same way. Despite the most talent-rich prospect pipeline in the league, the losses by the parent club made things like “hockey heaven” something to be used ironically only. Why I disregarded Pegula for the Bills was simple; I could not fathom a man who would not be so overcome with resentment, regret and anger at those involved that they would even consider doing something like that again. I couldn’t believe that he would get tossed in boiling water for three years and then say “is that burner up all the way?” I found it inexplicable that he would invite more criticism, take more control, that this guy would spend his fortune to make himself the head honcho of one of the most cursed sports cities on the Continent. That is a coolness, an inner calm, a confidence and ultimately a set of stones of a size that I cannot fathom. Western New York is Terrytown, Pegulaville, whatever you want to call it, aand what makes me happy is to know the man wants it just like that. He really would rather be nowhere else but right here, right now. In the end, the only people who said this wasn’t inevitable were those who get paid by reporting drama. In the end all the noise was coming from only those who could advance their career, pump their byline, attempt to cry and scream just enough to keep enough people tuned in, enough people clicking their links. This was the 2012 Presidential Election; it was never close but until the results were in you could bet your ass everyone paid to write or talk about it was going to make it seem close. The only mistake Tim Graham made throughout this process was what he would probably peg as his finest hour, when he “broke” the “news” that the Bon Jovi had contacted Jim Kelly to form some sort of supergroup. It’s laughable in hindsight and unprofessional in ways that should probably be laid out. First, he used Kelly’s frailty to paint a narrative where the MLSE group was going to use Buffalo’s hero to facilitate moving the team, which was a pretty dick move to Kelly and his family, and then he reported it without confirming- or disclosing- the result of the “meeting.” He managed to make everyone crazy and then the following day reported “just kidding, the meeting didn’t go anywhere.” Either he 1) didn’t know what was said and reported a story without knowing its full scope, or 2) knew what was said and chose to report half of it in order to get clicks. So is he dumb or unprofessional? Well, his writing is too good to be the former so let’s assume the latter. In the end though, the unprofessional antics of The Buffalo News have simply served to marginalize them further. In a world where relevant Sabres news is broken by TSN, The Hockey News or even a newspaper in Ottawa, TBN can be ensured their relegation to minor outlet for sports news is complete. Sure, the hit pieces will continue but when your swings barely reach the ankles of your target, exactly what kind of damage can you expect to inflict? They can continue to cry about the owner’s availability because quite simply Pegula has shown he doesn’t need them, he can create his goodwill with actions, not words. They can lament that the new owner refuses to play ball like the previous one considering the previous one created the bidding circus that allowed them to act relevant for a few months longer. In the end though, the ultimate end of The Buffalo News as a viable sports reporting entity makes the rest of Western New York media stronger.

2014 has sucked. I mean not so much for me personally what with this move to Maryland, but for the country, the world, the human race generally. Between Ferguson, the Malaysia Airlines flights, Russia trying to start a new war, ISIS, war crimes in Israel and Palestine, Ebola, the continued disintegration of political influence and freedoms for average Americans while the power of the state and the corporate entity continues to grow, it’s been a really shitty year (seriously I just ran those off from memory, what a fucking mess). I wasn’t alive in 1968 but from reading about it over the years 2014 seems the closest to ’68 that has occurred in my lifetime. We’re at war- STILL- and not sure what “winning” can ever look like. Race- well let’s just not even delve into it, police facing off against unarmed civilians like some post-apocalyptic film, and unrest throughout Europe caused by Russia being wildly antagonistic. Aside from the political assassinations of ’68 we really seem to have it all. It’s been said that 1968 was saved by Apollo 8, the first manned flight to orbit the moon. It came at Christmas that year and allowed everyone to celebrate something, to remember that sometimes good things happen. The purchase of a silly football team cannot replicate that on the same scale, but regardless of our thoughts about Israel’s role, or what to do about ISIS, or whether police have too much power, what we have today is something we can all get behind, celebrate, support, something none of us could have imagined only several short years ago. We deserve it, and while the rest of the world may continue to come apart at the seams, this is our time to forget about all that shit and dance. What now? Well there will be more than enough time for that because the Bills future is in perpetuity, it is not defined as six years of us sadly sipping blue lights outside trash can fires at the Ralph as our team inches closer to departure. The future is defined in whatever fashion we wish to do so and there will be plenty of time to call for Russ Brandon’s firing into Venus, where he will be flattened into nothing by its heavy atmosphere (I, for one, am eager to know exactly what role Brandon had in this sale, specifically to determine whether my suspicion - that he was the MLSE/Rogers man on the inside, setting the dominoes up just so in exchange for running Toronto’s NFL franchise, deciding to jump aboard what he felt was the winning team once Ralph’s health began to decline - is accurate). There will be plenty of debate as to the fates of the other lame ducks wandering the halls at One Bills Drive, of how best to end the playoff drought, of how best to move the franchise forward. That’s the fun part, though; no more “I just want them to stay,” no more fretting about whether or not the population drain means we can’t be “big time,” no more using sports to drive our regional insecurities. They are staying, and now we can just be fans, which is something we haven't been allowed to be in, well, arguably ever in this town. Now comes the fun part, just wanting them to win. Thank you Terry. Thank you Kim. Let’s go Bills.

Look. I know there is going to have to be some compromise on my part during this entire sale process. I have no control over the Buffalo Bills in any fashion. I can simply choose to watch and care. Nothing is up to me. All I can do is decide if I want them to be an important part of my life or not. The community of friends I have built around the team and how I interact with them make distancing myself from the franchise problematic. I’m a long way from home. Sports keeps a line open to all of the friends I’ve made. Sports is how I made them in the first place. I’m kind of a flake. It isn’t easy to make friends when you think every single person around you thinks you’re a flake. Sports act as the crutch I sometimes need to interact with people like a normal human being. Hang out in a crowd. Lob a few jokes around. People laugh. Suddenly they are talking to you. Did you just make a friend by talking about how bad Tim Connolly is? Sports!

This is the existential dilemma of sports. For it to exist properly, we must have an emotional connection to the enterprise. For it to be a success for all involved, you are going to have to maintain a rooting interest in the players or the team in your immediate geographic vicinity. Sports can be like theater, and ain’t nobody staying to watch a stage play where everyone is an asshole to you. So you buy in. You find people to like, maybe even love. We love the things they do and how they do it in dramatic fashion. We ride the emotional ride with them through all of the highs and lows. And we have no control. Where sports and theatre diverge is how much our sports organizations demand our allegiance. Do people wear Irish Classical Theatre jerseys? Is there a Shea’s Mafia? Do we ascribe our self-worth as an audience to a review of the latest performance of Waiting for Godot? Is somebody calling in WGR with all manner of hot takes on that last monologue or aside? Theatre asks for our love in different ways. They’d like for you to be there, be a polite audience, and maybe help out when they need money for renovations. Professional sport walks into your life and holds you at gunpoint. It is our childhood time killers hijacked by men with long mustaches, top hats and capes. We take something that has brought us immense joy in our lives and give responsibility for it to the wealthiest in our society – those who are the furthest from us in class, empathy, humility, and civics. If you don’t like a little politics in your sports, you can stop reading now. Go in peace.

Back from the dead, The Scizz joins The Barrister for some delightful conversation wherein the pair take endless potshots at everyone, talk about the pitiful Buffalo hockey club, ponder Donald Trump and the meaning of life, and discuss the Wayans brothers. And other stuff probably. Music from The Jambrones, LCD Soundsytem, Pearl Jam, and Electric Guest

I don't subscribe to the Sabres email list - this email was sent to people who do, and the homie @Mechaphil tweeted it and has told me that he believes this is the first instance of any such emails while he's been signed up on this list for the last 6 or 7 years - but if I did, I would expect some degree of care and respect and, I don't know, not this fucking garbage. This email is (a) not hockey-related, (b) not Sabres-related, and (c) bullshit.

Hockey Heaven this is not, assholes.

This is a fundamentally asinine and abusive use of fan interest to increase revenue by a team that deserves far less fan interest than it currently gets. This is the Third Jersey of emails. This is the Big John shirsey of emails. This is the Terry Pegula of emails.

Monty Python would write sketches about stupid shit like this and we'd all laugh and it would be grand but instead THIS REALLY HAPPENED AND CHRIST YOU ARE AN AWFUL FRANCHISE.

When people ask me why DGWU Sports has basically become a soccer-and-soon-baseball website, at least until the Bills get going again, this is now going to the top of the list. This is inexplicable.

You're now worse than the Bills, in almost every way. Congratulations. You did it.

Mr. Pegula, you've purchased a local hockey team that ought to be held in public trust, with community ideals held as sacred, and fan faith and love and interest cherished above all else. Instead, not only do you not win, and not only do you show scarce signs that you have any fucking clue how to win, and not only do you miss the mark with team marketing more often than you hit it, but now this. It's so fucking easy to not be the corporate behemoth that treats its fan base as money trees to be slaughtered and left to waste, but I guess it's also equally easy to do exactly that.

We shouldn't be surprised. You've made your billions by raping the environment, and now decide to dig wells into your fan base, rip cracks into the foundation of a city's love for its team, and take whatever you can straight to the bank. We don't even really know how inept the organization is, but we see signs enough to make us fear the worst. We ignore those signs out of little else than fear that these past 10 years might actually be the glory years when we're looking at the first pick in the 2035 NHL Draft, the Presidents Trophy and Divisional banners looking just as lonely as they do now.

I fucking love the Buffalo Sabres. But, as surely as I do, I hate the people insistent on ruining it.

Fan goodwill is forfeit, you money-grubbing pieces of shit. If you wanted my attention, you've gotten it. Hell, maybe this will be a Sabres site again. I guess I was probably waiting for something like this.... maybe now I'll come here much more often to talk about how much I loathe you vile sacks of excrement parading as Buffalo's next generation of revitalization heroes.

Back with actual Buffalo sports talk in a Dear God Why Us? Sports podcast, The Barrister, The Outlander and The Commander form a critical mass of the Deeg and break down what happened with the Sabres over the last few days. Good God, it was messy and beautiful and let's do it again soon.Musical interludes by way of The Jambrones, The Mooney Suzuki, Talib Kweli, Architecture in Helsinki and Basement Jaxx. Throw your hands up.
Download here or here. Stream below. Subscribe via iTunes below. Subscribe via RSS here. Do your thing the way you want it.

I really didn't know when I was going to write another post here. The Red Sox season- while for me magical and enthralling- has been described in many different publications and blogs by many different writers than myself in much more satisfying ways. Not to mention our readership's approval rating of the Red Sox has got to be hovering in the same ballpark as Congress' and I don't need to put something out exhalting my joy just for all you to shit all over it.

You're not my real dad dammit.

As for our local teams, up until about 9:15 this morning, what could really be said? Our Bills weekly previews and reviews capture this season's varying degrees of optimism and hopelessness, especially now that we just got clocked with the 2x4 of reality watching the Pittsburgh game. The best Sabres forward of the past fifteen years got traded and the team has embarked on a journey that many fan bases have endured but virtually no one who has ever watched this team has had to witness: the laughingstock year. The year of catching shit from every friend or coworker who roots for other teams or generally enjoys the despair of others; the season of watching them in numb resignation, too indifferent to yell at the television, not because the team didn't look terrible but because you knew that they simply couldn't do any better. They're a cast of guys who may be perfectly likable and able to contribute to the right team (except Stafford, fuck him), but to watch them skate around for two and a half hours chasing their own tail just simply wasn't a good use of our time.

The constant theme to make us want to tear our hair out- those of you with any considerable remaining scraps anyways- was the decision-making of the coach regarding lines, scratches and ice time, really the only things that a coach does that are pretty easy and straightforward. A coach watches the players and puts the best ones on the ice, with the most offensively skilled players matching up with others of their like. It's literally the only thing that someone playing NHL '14 can do as well as a real coach. And somehow, someway, this team managed to place a man in this position who could not even be passable at this task. These are not mistakes - as Doug Marrone, for instance, freely admits to making when they appear - it was a failure of philosophy; a flaw in Ron Rolston's hockey DNA that poisoned the entire franchise in a matter of months and has at the very least set back the development of young talent and possibly derailed it permanently. It's easy to not care about who wears the "C" when they're in the rightfully earned position for their skill set. It is much harder to ignore when that same player is being double shifted in the third period of a game you're being outshot by thirty.

So where did this get us, or me more specifically? I was offered tickets to last night's game and had not even the slightest bit of interest because there was a UB FOOTBALL game on television. Tickets were hovering in the low teens and I didn't even consider heading down to the FNC to take in the carnage. The overhead of attending a game (traffic, new security measures, parking, a late bedtime on a weeknight) had become too much to see what has been my favorite local team since well before I was a teenager. I've spent thirty bucks on weeknights just to yell at Patrick Lalime about how much he sucks, but I could no longer be bothered. A 3-7 Bills team appeared light years ahead of their NHL counterpart and it wasn't close. Any optimism for the future, be it trades, draft picks or free agents could be dismissed simply by mentioning those who were in charge of acquiring talent and developing talent. I am confident in saying there has not been as dark a time regarding the cumulative future of our professional teams, and while the Bills have had bright spots in the midst of an objectively dismal record, what did we have to look forward to regarding the hockey team? The jersey retirement of a guy who hasn't played for them in a dozen years? The failure of the young kids to ultimately develop and trigger the long overdue firing of Rolston some three years down the road? The hope that maybe the third time the seemingly immovable General Manager failed at rebuilding a team from the ground up, it would be his curtain call? Over six years removed from their last playoff series victory that distant hope for the future was too far off for many, including myself.

I’m going to try to keep this brief. Last year, they lost me.Fresh on the heels of another mediocre season and a prolonged, acrimonious, and completely avoidable lockout, the Buffalo Sabres started out the 2012-13 season like dog mess stuck to a boot. At that point, my frustration with the franchise reached critical mass, and I cashed out. I think I actually said to a TV, “Look, call me when you’re interested in being good again, because this shit is not working for me.”That was somewhere between games five and ten last year, and since then, I haven’t watched more than a stray minute or two of the Sabres. To be perfectly honest, I haven’t missed them. Sure, I stayed up to date with what was happening on twitter since there’s no way I could unfollow everyone in Buffalo twitter, but I was pretty much completely disengaged from the team.It’s a really and truly weird thing to actively dislike your favorite team. Sure, we all have that on some level with the Bills, but it was different for me with the Sabres. And it all came back to God damn Darcy Regier.I can handle failure. I mean, Jesus, I’m a Buffalo sports fan. Failure happens, but this franchise has been a walking, shambling corpse. It felt like Terry Pegula, the man we all thought was going to spend this team to a championship in short order, was nothing more than some stammering Whiner Line regular who was still stuck in the 90s. But after finally pulling the plug on Regier and Ron Rolston, it feels like there may actually be something good that comes from all this.The thought of Regier attempting to rebuild this franchise after he personally steered it into the ditch was, for the lack of a better term, completely fucked. We don’t know if Pat LaFontaine and whoever he hires to be general manager will be any better, but it’s different, and that’s enough to get my attention. Yes, that’s pretty sad, but that’s where we are. This is Progress. Capital P. I don’t really care about Ted Nolan. He’s not going to be around next year anyway, so just play the kids a lot every night and get the team working hard and I’ll consider his return a success.There have been a lot of people that think this move is just more bullshit from the Sabres because they brought back two guys with ties to the team. It’s certainly possible. LaFontaine doesn’t have any real experience as an executive, but he at least realizes it. He seems smart enough to hire someone who has done this before. But the larger point is this: Just because someone has ties to the organization doesn’t mean they’re clueless. It makes for an easy joke because hurr durr Buffalo, but anyone who says so is more interested in humping away at narrative than assessing the situation honestly. I want the best possible people to be the coach and GM of the Sabres, and I don’t care where they’re from. Hopefully Pat can put those people in place. If not, hopefully it doesn’t take a billion years for him and everyone else to be replaced.So am I back in? I don’t know. What I do know, though, is that they have my attention. Let’s go.

The first of many takes on this news... Guest contributor, former full-timer...

The Defenseman

This is all very odd. It probably has something to do with my fever-ridden brain, but all of this feels as if it may vanish next morning. Am I going to wake up in bed with Susane Pleshette? Is Patrick Duffy going to be in the shower? Am I a kid with autism staring at a snow globe?Terry Pegula finally took full ownership of the Buffalo Sabres on Tuesday night when he relieved General Manager Darcy Regier and Head Coach Ron Rolston on their posts. Regier had been GM for the Sabres for 16 years, winning no championships. In their places: Pat LaFontaine as President of Hockey Operations and Ted Nolan - TED NOLAN WHAT THE FUCK - as interim Head Coach. Now the last vestiges of Golisano and Rigas are gone. This is the real Pegula Day.

I've always kind of wondered about Pegula and his level control with this team. He took charge in a bath of glory from a desperate fanbase and then immediately proclaimed that nothing would change. There was no new vision. There was no grand strategic plan. It was the men he retained, finally being free of inept management. Pegula found out, brutally, that the ineptness resided within the room.

It could not be easy for the man. He showed deep emotional committment to Lindy Ruff and Regier on the day he took full vestment. He had to believe deep down in their abilities. To come to the realization that maybe your heroes cant save the world is, to borrow from Ruff's dialog, a tough one. But controlling a sports team means, quite often, having to dispense with the people you love and respect most in order to maintain peak performance. Pegula's sentimentality got the better of him. We should hope its a mistake he never makes again.

The Sabres have maybe acquired something they haven't had since the lockout of 2004, and that is vision. The infusion of LaFontaine may bring that grand plan the team had desperately been lacking for so long. Since Pegula bought the team they have wandered from one half-assed strategy to the next. They thought they could turn it around right when he bought the team in 2011, but couldn't quite make it work. No one could agree as to whether they were rebuilding or not after that. Did they start rebuilding last year? When they fired Ruff? When they hired Rolston? When they traded Pominville? The ship was without a captain.

Regier was always good at holding a thing together, but it felt like he was taking direction from elsewhere. He did well when someone else wrote the rules of engagement. Both Rigas and Golisano set financial goals for the franchise and had direct impact on personnel decisions made by the team. Pegula was adamant that wouldn't happen again, but assumed that the man taking orders was being restrained by the financial constraints as opposed to fulfilling the job at which he was his best. Pegula got a chance to see Regier's style of management for himself, free of interference, and saw a void. "Fuck. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe I just wanted to believe in this guy."

Hey man, you always said you were a fan first. Well this is a first rate fan fuck up. We do this shit all the time.

The blessings of unimaginable personal wealth is that you can fuck up without any personal risk. Saying Pegula is getting a second chance at this isn't quite phrasing right, because the guy never really took the helm, nor does he necessarily have a finite number of chances to take. This is where the guy is giving it a shot. This is where his mark is to be made. The fact that LaFontaine and Nolan both have been with this franchise before and worked together on Long Island in a similar capacity should not be mistaken for another bout of crippling sentimentality (although there is a great risk of it being just that). The two of them bring definitiveness.

No one would ever accuse Ted Nolan of being ambiguous. His goal and ambitions are clear to the point of friction. He causes intense heat in organizations. Lucky for him he joins a franchise where all the boilers are out. There maybe isn't a greater myth, in the classic sense of the word, in Buffalo sports than that of Nolan's ability to draw blood from stone and passion from the uninspired. His team was The Hardest Working Team In The NHL. They may not be good, but at least they will beat the shit out of somebody. Plenty of the old schoolers will be out in force clamoring for the days of the mid-90s. They'll march down Washington Street carrying signs that read "Corsi Who?" and "Math Can't Win In The Streets." They will be put to bed by a lullaby of Bob Boughner and Brad May, sleeping to dream of an end to analytics.

Seeing this element pop up makes me uneasy. I could hold my breath comfortably within the time one of these 90s hockey-worshiping mastodons calls an opposing player a faggot. Not the classiest brigade in the order of battle. Perhaps though, this is part of the myth building. Nolan's last gig was Head Coach of the Latvian national team. International hockey is not the best arena for rock'em sock'em hockey, yet Nolan got his squad into the Olympics. Maybe the man has more than just a bag of hammers in his toolbox, even if that's not what many Sabres fans care about right now.

LaFontaine got fired from the Islanders for telling them what he thought. That act should shine as an act of bureaucratic valor unparalleled in hockey. He is now on the outs on the Island. Their loss. I don't quite know what his game plan is. He never got a chance to put it into effect with the Islanders, but whatever it was it pissed off Charles Wang to the point of termination. Tell me more, Mr. LaFontaine.

We are in a position of potential energy maybe unseen in Buffalo sports. U.B. football is on the rise and Bulls hoops has a new lead. The Bills have completely turned over, Ralph Wilson is incapable of fucking it up, and just maybe they have a quarterback. And now the Sabres have finally, mercifully done what they should have done three years ago in releasing Regier.